All his life, Brooklyn artist Joseph Milazzo heard stories about his Cuban grandfather, a prolific painter named Enrique Dominguez. But Milazzo, 43, never had the chance to meet his abuelo — or see any of his artworks. His family abandoned them when the revolution forced them out of Cuba.

“Growing up, I was always told, ‘You get your talent from your grandfather,’ ” the Gravesend resident tells The Post. “But starting in my late 20s, early 30s, I started really thinking, ‘Who was my grandfather? Where was his artwork?’ I became more and more fascinated with trying to get to Cuba, with recovering the art that was left behind.”

“The Cuba Series: Portraits of the Old Guard,” on view Saturday in Carroll Gardens, documents Milazzo’s quest four years ago to find these mysterious pictures. His 20 large-scale paintings depict the people and places he encountered while searching for the past.

Milazzo’s mother barely knew her father, a mechanic with a passion for painting. She was 2 when he died of a ruptured spleen in 1948. Still, she remembers growing up in Santa Clara, Cuba, with one of his Madonnas hanging in their living room.

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In 1955, Milazzo’s mother and grandmother fled the country, leaving nearly all their belongings behind. His great-grandmother entrusted Dominguez’s paintings with her servants when she left in 1962, after Fidel Castro had taken power. “Nobody thought to remember who [the servants] were,” says Milazzo, who nevertheless went to Cuba in 2013 to track them down.

Arriving in Santa Clara, he went to his great-grandmother’s old street and started knocking on doors. He met a 70-year-old woman who learned math from Milazzo’s schoolteacher grandma. Other octogenarians in the village remembered eating the bread sold at Dominguez’s father’s bakery, now a government building. Though he’d yet to uncover a single painting by his grandfather, Milazzo says, “I knew I was going to leave Cuba with some kind of artistic project.”

It took a couple of years but, last February, Milazzo started painting some of the people he had met during his trip: a white-haired lady in straw sandals selling milk creams outside her house; a salsero playing the bongos in a Havana bar; a historian in a Cuban-flag sombrero.

“I wanted to make an impact,” Milazzo says. “The more I thought about the individual people [I met] — their faces, their character — it just boiled down to, I really honor these people.”